Making good progress on Arcade Poker. I spent a little more time on the graphics than on previous efforts, and it shows. It's a small, but good-looking, little game. I got the little EyeCandy numbers, now called DisplayNumber, working. Like the sparkles, they're in four colors (blue, green, red, yellow), and I've got a "random" color that makes the numbers flash in random colors. I must say that they look quite good, and I've already started working 'em into some of the older games. I'll try to get a screen shot of the numbers in a screen shot on the web page.
Just for giggles, I bought myself a force-feedback joystick, specifically the Microsoft one. I figured it might be fun to add force-feedback to Olive Wars and ThinkTank. Nothing fancy, just a gun-recoil when you fire a pimento. Anything for silliness :)
Finally, I must ask, does Apple have any idea what it's doing? Lemme make sure I understand this. . .
First off, Apple pays $400 mil to buy NeXT. NeXT makes an operating system that works on several processors, but not the one that Apple sells. Apple commits to porting the operating system to work with their machines, making the user-interface a sort of polyglot between the old and new. Unfortunately, Apple made the teensy mistake of thinking that companies would want to rewrite their products to support the new OS, so they added a layer that lets the old apps run with little modification. Later Apple figures out that nobody really wants a new OS, so they make it sound like the new OS is really the old one, only with pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection. Of course, Apple dumped their planned new OS with pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection when they bought NeXT!
Finally they release their answer to the under-$1000 Windows computer. It looks like a vacuum cleaner, has a 33k modem, no floppy drive, and costs $1300.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a big supporter of the mac, but I'm mighty worried that they're too far-removed from reality to survive.
